the road to character (3)

St. Augustine was a prodigy son growing up with an overbearing but extraordinarily spiritual mother during late Roman Empire times. 

He went on to become a self loving, lust driven, fame chasing young man who enjoyed "smarting out" with philosophical elites, until one day he realized he was chasing the same earthly pleasures as a beggar on the street, except he could not get them as easily as they could.

He looked into the vastness of human soul and found not only treachery and uncontrollability, but its deep rooted connection with God Almighty and the Grace that could only be accepted through humility.

Augustine did not live a tranquil, easy life after this "conversion". When he wrote his famous spiritual memoir Confession, he was not reminiscing a conquered experience but continuously reassessing that experience as he faced hard times in life. 

He reminded believers that the center of their lives is not in themselves, and the pleasures of this world are most delicious only when savored in the larger context of God's transcendent love.

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These are stories of three of the several people David Brooks, a New York Times columnist and writer, presents in his book "The Road to Character" that I read recently.

Brooks said he got the idea of writing the book after hearing the rebroadcast of an old-time radio program celebrating the end of World War II, where celebrities of the day commented the victory with subdued, humble tone, in great contrast to the flashy, self-ingratiating personalities that he encounters daily in our modern culture.

So he went on to study the lives and inner worlds of some historical great men and women, to know "how some people have cultivated strong character. It's about one mindset that people through the centuries have adopted to put iron in their core and to cultivate a wise heart. I wrote it to save my soul."

Here are my take:

Looking up the dictionary, the word "character" can mean value-neutral "features and traits," or virtue-ful "moral or ethical quality" of a person. My guess is we refer more to the former (e.g. "He's quite a character") than the latter (e.g. "He is a man of great character") nowadays. Our battered (and pampered) self would rather enjoy the idiosyncrasies of fun personalities than be saddled with solemn moralistic reminders on any given day.

In the occasion we do invoke the value aspect of the word, it is the virtue of tenacity, toughness, creativity--traits we need to achieve our personal goals--more than that of selflessness, generosity, self-sacrifice that we like to pick up on. We are taught to look highly at ourselves, then focus on improving our given talents to be the "best you can be" in our field of specialty in this utilitarian minded society anyway.

No surprise then many admire Steve Jobs for his brilliant product ideas and insistence on perfection but ignore his demeaning dealing with people and fact fabricating "reality distortion field" capability.

Rather than character, the favored word and top virtue of the day seems to be authenticity. To be really appealing to the mass today, one has to be genuine and relatable, open and honest about their personal life, and consistent with the message they send out. Jennifer Lawrence and Taylor Swift are two good examples.

This is not a bad thing, really: Great character cannot exist in vacuum, but is relational, validated through interactions with others. Transparency and authenticity, with the aid of godspeed Internet and wild fire social media today, help us find out who's got the juice and who's not, sooner rather than later.

That's why I admire people who say "My lifetime goal is to have those who know me best respect me most." Familiarity breeds contempt, if it breeds respect instead, something remarkable is shining through that person, warts and all notwithstanding, consistently and persistently.

I know this might sound simplistic, but here's my end thought: If character is an assembly of virtues, and there is no greater virtue than love... or, put another way: if all virtues are derivatives of love, under the supervision of love, sustained by love, then the road to character ought to be... "keep love alive"!

God help us do that!


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“Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.” -- Thomas Merton

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." -- 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
 

the road to character (2)

George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, was born in early 19th century England. Her father was a successful carpenter-turned-businessman, her mother an ill-healthed woman who lost twin boys 18 months after Mary Anne's birth. She then sent her surviving children away to boarding schools to spare herself the physical effort of raising them when Mary Anne was only 5. 

She was called back to tend to her mother's health at age 16 and subsequently took over the role of supervising the household after her death.

As a young child, Mary Anne was precocious, strong-willed, if somehow awkward, and enjoyed the company of adults more than children of her age, with hunger for affection and fear of abandonment.

In her late teens and early 20's, she was first driven by moral ardor and spiritual perfectionism to become a priggish religious nut: She gave up reading fiction, believing that a morally serious person should focus on the real world and not imaginary ones; she forswore wine and as manager of her household forced those around her into abstinence as well; she adopted a severe and puritanical mode of dress and allowed music only when it accompanied worship.

But her roving mind and capacious intellect couldn't be contained in such straitjacket mode for long. Pretty soon, besides reading Bible commentaries, she was learning Italian and German, reading Wordsworth and Goethe, as well as Romantic poets including Shelley and Byron, whose lives certainly did not conform to the strictures of her faith.

She also read voraciously books on modern sciences, including those that tried to demythify and reconstruct the life of Jesus through biblical accounts, as well as those that tried to defend it. She found the latter unsatisfactory and unpersuasive and her doubts on her Christian beliefs continued to grow.

"While I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life… to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness,” she said in a letter to her father.

Things finally came to a head when she declared a "Holy War" with her father and refused to go to church with him. She wrote to her father that she would like to go on living with him, but if he wanted her to leave, “I can cheerfully do it if you desire it and shall go with deep gratitude for all the tenderness and rich kindness you have never been tired of showing me. So far from complaining I shall joyfully submit if as a proper punishment for the pain I have most unintentionally given you, you determine to appropriate any provision you may have intended to make for my future support to your other children whom you may consider more deserving.”

She reconciled with her father a few months later, however, after realizing her selfish grand-standing had been hurting her beloved father and causing damages to the people surrounding and society in general. She agreed to accompany her father to church, so long as he and everybody else understood that she was not a Christian nor a believer in the doctrines of the faith.

She went on to meet and socialize with a variety of artists, philosophers and literati of the intelligentsia circle of London. Intellectually she was mature. The intensive reading she had done throughout her adolescence produced an impressive depth of knowledge and a capacity for observation and judgment.

Emotionally, though, she was still something of a basket case. By the time she was 22 it became a joke in her circle that Mary Anne fell in love with everyone she met. These relationships followed a general pattern: Desperate for affection, she would throw herself at some man, usually a married or otherwise unavailable one. Dazzled by her conversation, he would return her attention. Mistaking his intellectual engagement for romantic love, she would become emotionally embroiled, hoping their love would fill some void in herself. Finally he would reject her or flee, or his wife would force her out of the picture. Mary Anne would be left awash in tears, or crippled by migraines.

Her emotional maturity continued to grow through these heart aches, though, and at age 32, she met her true love and soul mate George Lewes, a self-made writer who was officially married to an estranged wife from whom he could not legally divorce.

Mary Anne and Lewes fell in love over ideas. In the years before they met they had been drawn to the same writers, often at the same time. They composed essays on overlapping subjects. They both took the search for truth with the same earnest intensity, and both subscribed to the idea that human love and sympathy could serve as the basis for their own morality as a substitute for a Christianity they could not actually believe in.

They finally decided to take the plunge and eloped to the European continent, where they spent the rest of their lives as husband and wife, and Lewes helped Mary Anne (now taking the pen name George Eliot) unleash her writing talent to become one of the greatest English novelists and writers of Victorian era, if not of all times.

They lived happily through their 24 year marriage together. “I am very happy— happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own healthy activity. I feel, too, that all the terrible pain I have gone through in past years, partly from the defects of my own nature, partly from outward things, has probably been a preparation for some special work that I may do before I die. That is a blessed hope, to be rejoiced in with trembling."

"Adventure is not outside man; it is within,” she would write.

the road to character (1)

Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower grew up as a farm boy in small town Kansas, with a strict father and a religiously devout but loving mother, alongside 6 brothers. 

He was an ill-tempered kid when one Halloween evening he was forbidden to go trick-or-treating with his elder brothers he got into such a rage he went pounding his fists against the trunk of an apple tree in the front yard, scraping the skin off and leaving his hands bloody and torn.

He went to West Point primarily for the free tuition and was academically mediocre and behaviorally defiant and rebellious. He graduated in 1915, lobbying furiously to be sent to the World War I and finally received the order to ship out to France on November 18, 1918, one week after the war ended.

He spent the next 20 years training troops, coaching football, and doing logistics in the US. By his 40's, he was easily the least accomplished of the boys in the Eisenhower family. Nobody expected great things of him.

But he settled in and learned the secrets of thriving within the military organization. He learned to master procedure, process, teamwork, and spot and elevate the right ideas from people: "When I go to a new station I look to see who is the strongest and ablest man on the post. I forget my own ideas and do everything in my power to promote what he says is right."

He was appointed personal assistant to General Douglas MacArthur, a man he disliked for his aristocratic air and above-institution attitude but served him loyally for 8 years, as he did for all other superiors he'd been assigned to.

As the supreme commander of World War II allies, he suppressed his own frustrations in order to keep the international alliance together. As President, he hid his private thoughts, and wore a costume of affability, optimism, and farm-boy charm in public to lead the country. 

He once told his grandson that his smile “came not from some sunny feel-good philosophy but from getting knocked down by a boxing coach at West Point. ‘If you can’t smile when you get up from a knockdown,’ the coach said, ‘you’re never going to lick an opponent.’"

To tame his underlying anger, he took the names of the people he hated, wrote them down on slips of papers, and tore them up and threw them in the wastebasket.
 
He was a master of army expletives, but almost never cursed in front of women and would walk away from a dirty joke; a 4-pack-a-day heavy smoker at the end of WW II but quit it cold turkey one day. 

"Freedom," he would say in his 1957 State of the Union speech, "has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline."

He wrote that "It's all my fault if Normandy invasion failed" note but also a curt and emotionless letter to his war time chauffeur/secretary and rumored lover at her dismissal at the end of the war.

After his death, his vice president, Richard Nixon, recollected, "Ike was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of these words. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem... His mind was quick and facile." 

"He was honorable but occasionally opaque, outwardly amiable but inwardly seething," added his recent biographer Evan Thomas. 

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"Take a bucket, fill it with water, 
Put your hand in — clear up to the wrist. 
Now pull it out; the hole that remains 
Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed…. 
The moral of this quaint example: 
To do just the best that you can, 
Be proud of yourself, but remember, 
There is no Indispensable Man!"
-- Anonymous poem carried in Ike's pocket

rhine river cruise

We've been thinking about taking a river cruise through Europe for some time, so when a good friend couple suggested we join them for a "Romantic Rhine" river cruise that they had signed up for some months ago we practically jumped on it without much weighing and dawdling like we normally would.

From the Alps

The cruise started at a little town northwest of Zurich, so we took flight from LA to Zurich a couple days early to take time touring the city and the country before the cruise got started. 

Zurich is a nice little big town nestled between a lake, two rivers and some wooded hills north of the Alps, wearing the crowns of one of the busiest financial centers and wealthiest cities in the world underneath its calm and classy setting. 

We strolled down from our cozy little hotel nearby Zurich University campus to visit the old town district with canals and bridges, shops and cathedrals, and had our first taste of bratwurst and fries at a popular local eatery we found through the Yelp mobile app.

   

We also took a one-day excursion to another tourist town in central Switzerland, got cabled up to a mountain for a May snow surprise, then an equally surprising scenic lake ride back.

   

Through the Bourg, Bergs, and Heims

Other than our first stop Strasbourg, which is located on the French side of the German-France border, the rest of our ports of call all lay in German territory. 

Besides the usual cathedrals and town centers with lively crowds in each of these little and big towns we walked by, we also got to sit down and sip beers at the sunny romantic Heidelberg; watched how the world's first printing press was set and done at Gutenberg Museum in Mainz; awed by the grandiose monument celebrating German unification some 150 years ago at a majestic hill side park overlooking Rudesheim; and enjoyed a true Black Forest cherry cake and coffee at--where else--the true Black Forest in southwestern Germany.

   

On the Rhine

A river cruise ship is a miniature ocean cruise liner. Instead of hosting two or three thousand people, it holds only 110 guests in our case, for example. 

What it cannot provide--such as casino or lavish stage shows--it tries to make up with fine services and finer entertainment programs. All our meals were of high quality ingredients and exquisite design and all dinners were served with complimentary wines. There was usual light jazz piano music at the lounge at night for dancing and one particular evening a string trio performance by 3 young upwardly mobile East European musicians was so extraordinarily good and touching it counted as one of the high-lights of our trip.

To the Lowlands

Amsterdam is the end point of our cruise. We took a canal tour around the city, then a bike ride in the afternoon that wound through the beautiful, serene country side of Holland, which is literally just one corner turn away from this bike-crazed metropolis.

We spent one extra day finishing up our street tour and visiting a museum that hosts master pieces of Dutch Golden Age maestros such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, and had a nice dinner at a nice little park next to our hotel with great tasting Belgium beer.

   


Back to the New Land

From the old we flew back to the New Amsterdam (the original name of Manhattan) the next day. Off the plane, I found the skies sunny blue instead of gloomy gray, streets wide and straight where pedestrian right of way reigns, the Statue of Liberty holding her torch on the gleamy harbor... Neil Diamond's "Coming to America" buzzing in my head...

We spent the next two days touring New York City, just like we did with those German towns and Zurich and Amsterdam, strolling through parks, going to restaurants, visiting museums... Big Apple seems to have them all, old and new, glamour and substance... Frank Sinatra's song lyrics "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere" buzzing in my head...

   

The Memorables

Besides our good friend couple (Sean & Sophie), Gohan and Jiafen were the other couple we traveled with. We met, ate, toured, and laughed a lot every day. One thing worth noting was Gohan is a recovering lung cancer patient who's still undergoing chemo therapy, yet we didn't see him hampered physically or emotionally in any way, but jolly and energetic all the time.  

We shared our faith and "family feud" mostly light-hearted, occasionally serious, but always progressively enlightening and helpful to each other.

Then when in New York, we met Sean & Sophie's daughter Tiffany who was engaging happily with her exciting new job and life here with a loving boy friend beside; and Angie, a dear friend of ours who looked just as chipper and charming as we last saw her some 4 and a half years ago. 

These were precious moments we came to enjoy, as much as or even more than the mountains and monuments, lakes and rivers, castles and cathedrals that we saw all through the trip!

    

* For more photos and details of the trip, please go to 

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